A. Peter Dewey

Albert Peter Dewey (8 October 1916-26 September 1945) was an American OSS Lieutenant-Colonel during World War II. In September 1945, he was accidentally killed by the Viet Minh during the anti-French uprising in Saigon.

Biography
Albert Peter Dewey was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1916, the son of Congressman Charles S. Dewey. He worked for the Paris bureau of the Chicago Daily News after graduating from Yale in 1939, and he joined a Polish Army ambulance corps during the Battle of France in 1940, escaping through Spain to Portugal when France fell. On 10 August 1944, he returned to the fray when he parachuted into southern France as an OSS agent, reporting on German troop movements. On 4 September 1945, he was sent to Saigon, Vietnam as part of a seven-man OSS team, arranging the repatriation of 4,549 Allied POWs from Japanese internment camps. During the street fighting between the Viet Minh independence rebels and the returning French authorities in September, he brokered talks between a Viet Minh spokesman and the senior French representative in the city, infuriating British general Douglas Gracey, who declared Dewey a "subversive force" and a persona non grata. The violence escalated, and Dewey urgently cabled his superiors and warned them that Vietnam was burning, that the French and British were finished there, and that the US should clear out of Southeast Asia. Two days later, on 26 September 1945, he set out for the airport to fly to OSS headquarters, but he was mistaken for a Frenchman at a Viet Minh roadblock and was killed instantly. Ho Chi Minh later wrote to the US and lamented Dewey's accidental death, as Dewey had been sympathetic to his cause.